Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Can the Tea Party Take Over the GOP?

By Alan
Caruba

“Republicans
never, ever win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by
campaigning on a conservative agenda—drawing a sharp contrast between the
Democrat worldview and the conservative worldview.”

That’s
Richard A. Viguerie offering his insight and advice in his new book, “Takeover”
($27.95, WMD Books) and, if you have been wondering why Republicans have been
losing presidential elections with candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney,
he tells you why. “It is hard for conservatives to understand that
establishment Republicans are the enemy.”

By
“establishment” he is referring to the inner circle of elites who have been
content to work with Democrats they have for decades to make government bigger
because they like spending taxpayer dollars just as much and have embraced Big
Government by creating the Department of Education, the EPA, and other entities.

Viguerie
has been involved in building the conservative political base in America since
the days of Barry Goldwater. Starting in 1961 he used direct mail to build and
enlarge that base, and he has had to watch a succession of so-called
Republicans from Nixon to Bush 41 and 43 campaign as conservatives and then act
like Democrats.

“In the
short time that George W. Bush was president and the Democrats held the
majority in Congress (2007-2008), spending jumped by $700 billion—$4.7 trillion
in FY 2006 to $5.4 trillion in FY 2008.”

Significantly,
Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, wrote the
foreword to “Takeover”, saying “It is a civil war between limited-government,
constitutional conservatives and the progressive, establishment wing of the
GOP. And make no mistake: the establishment wing of the Republican Party is
progressive, and has been ever since conservatives stymied Teddy Roosevelt’s
attempt to reclaim the Republican presidential nomination in 1912 and make
progressivism that governing philosophy of the Republican Party.”

The
subtitle of Viguerie’s book is “The 100-year war for the soul of the GOP and
how conservatives can finally win it.” If you need to learn that history, this
is the book to read. If you want to see how conservatives can reclaim the
government from both the Democrats and the Republican elites, you need to read
this book.

Viguerie
reminds us that, when Republicans hewed to conservative principles, they won
three landslide presidential elections in 1980, 1984, and 1988, but when they
put those principles of small government, fiscal prudence, and a strong
military in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, they lost—big time.

When the
Tea Party movement spontaneously emerged in response to Obamacare and Obama’s intention
to “transform” America, “Today’s establishment Republican leaders did their
best to alienate and marginalize the new conservative bloc of the Tea Party
movement.”

As of this
writing, the day after the June 3 primaries, Tea Party supported Republican candidates,
Joni Ernst in Iowa and Steve Daines in Montana had won while, in Mississippi,
the race was so close that there will be a run-off between Tea Party challenger
Chris McDaniel against Thad Cochran.

The good
news, as Viguerie points out is that “For over twenty years polls have shown
that Americans, by a two-to-one margin, self-identify as conservatives. Today,
a record number of Americans—60 percent according to the Gallup Organization’s
governance poll—say that the federal government has too much power. This
follows on an earlier Gallup poll in which 64 percent of those responding said
the greatest threat to freedom in Big Government—and the biggest jump in that
fear is among Democrats.”

The result
in 2010 was Tea Party candidates, “without any real direction from the national
GOP, drew a sharp contrast with Big Government Republicans and with the
Democrats on taxes, spending, the growth of government, and especially on
Obamacare, to power the GOP to pick up six Senate seats and win historical
sixty-three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, recapturing the
majority, and making it the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for
any midterm election since the 1938 midterm elections.”

Barack
Obama has been a gift to conservatives and we are seeing his approval ratings
fall like a rock. “For fifty years I have been saying that to change things and
stop the slide to socialism, two things needed to happen: first, things need to
get really bad really fast; and second, there needs to be some political
vehicle, some means for the people to channel their anger, and to translate
their outrage into political action. Guess what: we’re there.”

The
forthcoming November midterms can save America from the Democrats and from the
establishment Republicans, the elites in Washington who have been happy to
expand the government and continue spending money we don’t have.

The bulk
of Americans are conservative and, in November, they have to go to the polls
and elect Tea Party candidates, regain control of the Senate, expand membership
in the House, and provide the means to thwart Obama’s “transformation” of
America.

4 comments:

I agree there is a patriotic political tsunami in the making that has been ignored in large measure by the Lamestream Media, which threatens to place the Tea Party Movement in charge of both Houses of Congress come November, 2014.

However, the executive branch and its federal bureaucracy still call the Big Government shots so the stage is set for conflict in 2015 that I hope will not become violent.

After all, it is a case of the American revolutionary train running head on into the Obama style Russian Revolutionary locomotive under full steam.

For people who don't want violent conflict, that keeps getting brought up over and over and over.

Actually, many people seem to understand that the problem is politicians who think they are entitled to their job for life (they's make that a law if they could). There's no such thing as citizen government anymore. Don't know if enough people care or not. As noted above, many just think it's time to pull out the guns and start shooting. Not much of an improvement over the current regime and a lot more costly.

I'd say insurrection worked well in removing an oppressive British regime in America during the late 18th century - and that the republic established in 1789 by the violent American Revolutionary War of 1775 to 1781 was a vast improvement over the royal government of King George III.

A little civics lesson, TAC, America is a representative democracy under a constitution, not a "citizen government" where the majority rules, as you seem to think and, yes, the people who count in this country DO CARE, as witness the creation of the Tea Party Movement (TPM) in 2009.

In regards to "pull out the guns and start shooting" - the TPM opposition to date has remained peaceful. This despite the fact that American Patriots have every right to remove the Obama regime by force based on the president's track record of rule by Executive Orders that marks him as a dangerous tyrant.

A wise man once said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution."inevitable."

I do not think the time for a Second American Revolution has come.

I do not advocate violence.

I think there are plenty of non-violent steps yet to be taken, for example, massive Martin Luther King style peaceful civil rights marches, strikes and individual acts of resistance like refusal to pay federal income taxes.

However, if at the end of a very long day, all acts of redress fail and the oppressive federal government makes war on the American People, as did the British Army in 1775 when it marched north from Boston on the great gun grab raid, We The People have no other option except to defend ourselves.

Is the TEA Party the answer to all of Americas ills? I don't think so, I'm not sure the TEA Party has the presence of mind to realize what they have at their finger tips.

The GOP is run by a bunch of stodgy old *go along to get along* people that will jump on the Dem bandwagon with no 2nd thought. The GOP is in severe need of a serious makeover but the TEA Party needs to get a grip on some of their local chapters.

In some areas, right here in North Texas certainly, the TEA Party has alienated more Conservatives, and driven them back to the GOP, than far too many care to admit to.

The TEA Party, much like the GOP, is very good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.